Multi-sensory learning ideas to try at home
Multi-sensory learning is when an individual uses more than one of their senses when taking in new information. When we see (visual), hear (auditory) touch (tactile) and move (kinaesthetic) to learn, different areas of the brain are engaged, which helps strengthen our memory for that new information.
Exploring multi-sensory approaches to learning can allow an individual to discover the techniques that work most effectively for them, are effective for all learners, but particularly for individuals with dyslexia. Individuals with dyslexia often have difficulty absorbing new information, especially if is it abstract or involves memorising sequences or steps.
Multi-sensory techniques help break down these barriers by making abstract ideas more concrete, turning lists into movements, sights and sounds. For individuals who need to develop their fine and gross motor skills, these techniques can also be beneficial.
What does this mean for learning activities?
This can sound a little intimidating if we’re thinking about activities we can do to support literacy difficulties at home, but there are simple techniques that use the different senses.
Many of these are ‘low threat’, which means a learner can make mistakes easily and rectify the mistake before committing anything to paper with a pen that can’t easily be erased.
Often the stress of having to commit an idea to paper is another barrier, particularly for a young dyslexic learner. Here are a few simple ideas for activities at home.
Reading
Try air writing a letter or word, while saying the letter. Trace the letters or words into sand, or write them onto surfaces with different textures. You can buy scratch pads quite cheaply that reveal gold or rainbow metallic letters when you scratch away the black covering. Fridge magnet letters can be used in lots of different ways.
Tapping out sounds in a word as you say the word, just between finger and thumb, can help distinguish between the individual sound units and manipulate them into words. Using post-it notes with one letter or sound on each, allows for easy movement to spell different rhyming words that can then be read and heard.
Shared reading allows an individual to hear someone else read while they follow along. They can use a finger to follow the letters or words as you read, but you can also take it in turns to read each word in a sentence, or each sentence in a longer text. This keeps the story moving, allows you to model how to read sentences with different tones of voice if required, and reduces the ‘overwhelm’ that can happen if an individual is confronted with a large piece of text to read alone.
Take a small piece of writing and spot different things. Find letters and underline them or draw rings around them, find the long vowel sounds and colour them in with a highlighter.
Spelling
Simply saying the letters as you write the word is a multi-sensory technique. If the individual is also tracing that word into sand, or moving letters around to form the word, then they are using four different senses to engage different areas of the brain and commit the information to memory.
For those who are learning about prefixes and suffixes, learning about the meaning of these parts of the words, then writing the words and highlighting the different prefix or suffix in different colours can help with recognition of the spelling pattern, but also help with decoding when reading.
Organising Ideas
Mind maps and pictorial lists are an effective approach to help organise ideas. They enable an individual to independently ready themselves for learning tasks, or organise key ideas for a specific subject before writing.
